Pediatric Kidney Transplant

We understand that your child’s kidney transplant journey is stressful for your entire family. We offer a variety of services to support you, your child, and your family through the process. For instance, our child life program helps your child cope with hospitalization through play, procedure preparation, and opportunities for self-expression. Our Hospital School allows children to continue their academic development and keep up with their studies while undergoing medical treatment. Access to the Ronald McDonald House provides your child and family with a home away from home during the transplant journey.

If your child is an adolescent, we partner with our adult kidney transplant program to help them make the transition to adult care. Because getting teens to adhere to their medication regimens is a key factor in avoiding teen and young-adult kidney transplant failure, we emphasize, teach, and empower self-care.

Duke Children’s is one of a handful U.S. hospitals verified as a Level I children's surgery center by the American College of Surgeons. This Level I designation recognizes our commitment to providing the safest and highest-quality surgical care.

Our transplant doctors are constantly improving not only surgical techniques but also anti-rejection medication regimens. For example, Duke is one of the few pediatric programs nationwide to offer both calcineurin-free and steroid-free anti-rejection medication tailored to your child based on close monitoring, their age, their immune system, and the specifics of their transplant. This option eliminates the long-term side effects associated with steroid and calcineurin inhibitor use and helps the transplanted kidney function longer. 

Duke routinely performs living donor transplants in children -- our one-year survival with functioning living donor graft is higher than the national average (100% versus 97.79%). If a potential living kidney donor turns out not to be a match to your child, we offer paired kidney exchange program for our pediatric patients, which allows donors to “swap” recipients so that each child receives a compatible organ.

We are one of the few pediatric programs in the region to offer incompatible-blood-type living donor transplants. This makes living kidney donor transplants possible when the blood types of the donor and recipient do not match.

As one of the nation’s leading research centers in pediatrics, transplant medicine, and immunology, we offer access to the most current research innovations. As a patient at Duke, your child may be eligible to participate in ongoing clinical trials specifically relevant to children undergoing kidney transplant.

We have significant experience performing multi-organ transplants, including pediatric liver-kidney, lung-kidney, and heart-kidney transplants as well as multivisceral transplants involving liver, intestine, pancreas, and kidney.